Read the following classic books (I'm sure there are others) to get a better perspective on why "working hard" itself may be a luxury. They helped me understand better. Good luck!
Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.
This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.
Ehrenreich's book has been pretty widely rebutted, especially by Adam Shepherd, who wrote his own book. Shepherd started with $25, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and an empty gym bag and ten months later managed to have a job, an apartment, a pickup truck, and $5300: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings
Adam was a SINGLE, male, white, young, healthy, 25-yr old who worked mostly in construction during a construction boom (iirc).
FYI: I have not read this book, but have read reviews of it.
Anyway, the main point here is that lots of poor people with average willpower remain poor because life is just too tough for them. Nobody is saying that it is impossible for a poor person with above-average willpower to become rich.
There is no prejudice against the middle-class person with average willpower who remains middle-class. Why should we shower contempt on the poor who possess only average willpower?
More to the point, Adam was willing to live the way poor people actually live, rather than maintaining unreasonable middle-class lifestyle expectations (living in day motels!?) and whining about how being poor didn't pay the bills like Ehrenreich.
My main point here is that upper-middle-class people who go as far as Ehrenreich to argue that you just plain need an upper-middle-class income to get by are revealing more about their level of decadence than about the plight of the actual working poor. At best it's well-intentioned but patronizing--at worst it's just plain cynical.
Just to clarify: Barbara also wrote about others she met living in motels because of lack of money for a deposit. She wasn't the only one doing so.
Again, an explanation that made sense to me. At the extreme low end (using the analogy of quantum mechanical effects), effects of the lack of money will be different than the effects at a higher income level.
Just speaking for myself: if I had only $40 at the end of the night, I would check into a motel rather than go to a homeless shelter. AFAIK, there aren't an abundance of homeless shelters either, and they are populated by literally mentally ill people and I would be afraid for my safety. Not to mention the question of losing ones dignity by going to a homeless shelter. YMMV.
Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.
This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.